Phew, that's that over with for another year. We had a good one and I hope you all did too, see it didn't matter that you hadn't done all those things you meant to do did it?
Everyone had a great time without the homemade crackers didn't they? We just heaped the contents (same for about the last ten years) on the table, all shouted 'Bang' and piled in as usual.
There was a rash moment of over-brandying of the pudding (the Kayaker, who else) followed by a premature approach with the lighted match,(Bookhound) but eyebrows don't take that long to grow back do they?
And we did manage to spoon the cream, spilt in the mayhem, off the tablecloth and back into the jug so that was fine too.
I've been having a massive clear up here in recent weeks, piles and piles of books
seemed to have migrated off the shelves, all over the place and it felt like organised
imbroglio (enjoying that word now) books gathered together for reading
trails, a stack of started and not finished books, and I might add left unfinished
for all the wrong reasons, distracted by something else (the Booker,
Ways With Words) and not because the books themselves were in any way
poor.
How can I have left these lying in semi-read state, The Truth Commissioner by David Park, Remember Me by Melvyn Bragg, Blood Kin by Ceridwen Dovey and I'm vexed because now I can't decide under the new Epstein Rules whether to revisit or not. I was enjoying all of them pre-interruption but it takes a lot to start over.
It's also the lure of the new arrivals that does it, each book arrives and suddenly I want to read it now.
So
I've whittled it all down to essentials to kick off 2009, started some exciting reading trail stacks and I know
there are some brilliant new books on the way too, so plenty to look
forward to.
Looking back on Around the World in Eighty Books which
began back in January and got stuck in the Levant, I think I have just about
managed eighty books from around the world so at least I've managed to
complete one reading journey I embarked on. But that is the joy of reading trails, they are there to be digressed from, it's in my rules, wherever the path leads I can follow.
Looking back on my 2008 reading and thinking I couldn't possibly choose my 'Best Books' I realised that there was a different way of doing it. Plenty of my favourites have emerged in the prize-draws but when I looked again a baker's dovegreyreader's dozen leapt out with ease.
Not necessarily published this year either but books that had created a very special reading experience, something unique, memorable and for reasons various, and in no particular order other than order of reading, here are the first three
"If you cannot visit your own orgins - reach out and touch them from time to time - you are for ever in some crucial sense untethered."
Oleander Jacaranda by Penelope Lively (Penguin and sent to me by Clara, thank you Clara) was the main reason my Around the World from the armchair trip stalled in The Levant. Imagine my pleasure then to meet Penelope at the Ways With Words Memoir Writing course in France and hear first-hand from her so much more about the writing of this and many more of her books. A writer who I have read and loved for years, what a treat and this a very thought-provoking look at a memoir.
"Beneath all differences was the belief that the whole house was essentially one. Together they were one world and could take on the world."
Amongst Women by John McGahern (Faber) whose writing always holds and plays that beautiful Irish chord just waiting to be played in my mind and I have many more still to read. Only discovered here in recent years, but a writer who sits me down and makes me consider the small details of the lives he writes.
"Modernity's like a badly trained dog: try and make it heel, even for a moment, and it turns and bites the hand that fed it."
Clear by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate) just exemplifies for me how exciting contemporary fiction can be. Nicola Barker challenges my assumptions, plonks me (in this case literally) right outside the box and makes me see and read the world I live in very differently. This feels like one of the excellent benefits of a book; through its pages I can live in the past or I can live right in the here and now. Nor can I profess from down here in splendid rural etc to know all there is to know about the 'here and now' going on out there, but writers like Nicola Barker make sure I can find out, experience something new and understand just a bit more each time.
More tomorrow.
Recent Comments